Riding the Iron Rooster / Behind the Wall
Thubron, Colin & Theroux, Paul
Here is the first literary fruit of the new access to China: two first-person accounts of solitary travel on the mainland. The authors are prominent, and both divide their careers as novelists and...
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...Law, Legislation and Liberty...
...Ornamental trees and flower-beds were dug up...
...1010 + xviii pages...
...He agrees with Theroux that millennia of obedience to one Emperor or another, and then to a Chairman, have established a tradition of evading blame and attributing it to the leader...
...Putnam's Sons/$21.95 BEHIND THE WALL: A JOURNEY THROUGH CHINA Colin Thubron/Atlantic Monthly Press/$18.95 Francis X. Rocca 44 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1989 T hubron treats religion more sensitively than Theroux...
...These seventeen issues, "founded in a commitment to human liberty," were published in the 1960s...
...litany of inventions by the Chinese: gunpowder, the steam engine, the mechanical clock, etc...
...Nor is Thubron pleased with the aftermath...
...When he visits a Nanjing household, which is riven by peculiar political pressures and beset by universal frustrations, he gets revelations that defy pieties about the discipline and solidarity of the Chinese family...
...Even pet cats and dogs were slaughtered (producing a plague of rats...
...These vicarious effects are only possible because the author has the good will of his reader...
...He is humane: he buys an owl at a market rather than have it slaughtered as a delicacy...
...Everyone in his life has wished for someone he disliked to be trundled off to shovel shit—especially an uppity person who has never gotten his hands dirty...
...Not as a believer, but with respect, he documents the slow revival of several traditions that have withstood official atheism...
...Theroux's view is not uncritical, but it is absurdly sentimental in light of the facts...
...like a polar ice cap, but emptier...
...His terrestrialism serves him well in the PRC, where the national airlines acronym, CAAC, is said to stand for "China Airlines Always Crashes" (or "Cancels...
...To him, purges of Chinese intellectuals are merely "boring political ambushes...
...Thubron finishes his journey at the western end of the Wall at Jiayuguan, the very end of classical China, once called the Mouth of China, from which exiles were traditionally spat into oblivion...
...Theroux writes in plain language well suited to the long haul...
...Without taking false economies of language, he manages elegant concision, even in luxuriant passages, such as the description of Suzhou: White-washed houses sealed the main streets in a skin of carved lintels and lattices, and along the canals the lanes became footpaths of mellow paving...
...Certain subjects are conspicuously neglected...
...Unkind caricatures, such as those of a mercenary chauffeur and his tag-along girlfriend who take Theroux on a perilous ride to Tibet, provide some needed comic relief...
...Thubron shows the human as well as the architectural wreckage of the Cultural Revolution more dramatically than Theroux, and he lays more blame on Mao...
...Theroux is harsh...
...His is erudite reportage throughout...
...The portraits are distinct and memorable...
...He considers the Chinese especially cruel, to animals and each other, yet he strives to be fair...
...NEW F 11) OM bbertyPress MODERN AGE: THE FIRS A SELECTION Edited by George A. Panichas WENTY-FIVE YEARS hese seventy-eight essays present the richness and diversity of recent conservative scholarship...
...The authors are prominent, and both divide their careers as novelists and travel writers...
...Clay barges glided on the wind-stirred current, parting a drift of leaves and feathers, while above them verandas and fish-scale roofs glissaded and petered out in creepers...
...Thubron agonizes over his judgments...
...No matter how charismatic Mao's image remains, it is bemirched with blood...
...Officials, doctors, teachers, scientists—all the elite of the professions and the arts, anybody tinged with privilege or the West (and millions who weren't)—were ritually humiliated, ingeniously tortured, exiled, beaten to death...
...By his silence, he dismisses the oppression of religion...
...He inspects but barely picks at his meal of python and cat in a Canton restaurant, to the reader's relief...
...A hysterical xenophobia reigned...
...On the magnitude of the horror he is emphatic: Nobody was safe...
...Grumpiness over food, weather, and an intractable bureaucracy are understandable...
...As the man speaks, Thubron watches his physiognomy transform, when he doffs his cap, puts on spectacles, or merely turns his head...
...He is never "literary," except when he alludes to his reading along the way, which ranges from Kidnapped to The Golden Lotus...
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...It is a blunt and slightly slangy style, peppered with profanity and laced with italics: They spat all the time...
...Thubron ingratiates himself by humor at his own expense, as when the rescued owl fouls its own bag, to the disgust of other train passengers, who regard Thubron as a lunatic for wasting a fine meal...
...Then he points out that they forgot them all, and had to copy them again from the West...
...He illustrates copiously the conformism and cowardice of the Chinese, with additional and unflattering views of their newly flourishing commercialism...
...and they write with quill pens...
...Oddly, foreignness in itself can elicit confidence from this reserved people, as both writers discover...
...But of course I would be among them...
...Today they are a nation of industrious anachronists, who are still making those steam engines...
...Thubron is compassionate: he shares an old widower's grief and a young man's unrequited love...
...He is not a bigot in the regular sense, but a promiscuous misanthrope, who travels the globe to witness the diversity of human depravity...
...This book is not exactly an apology for Mao...
...They grew not only by municipal decision but by private love, and had seeded themselves in the clefts of walls or under the weeping willows...
...The Chinese find this sort of talk embarrassing...
...In fact, this is not China at all, by ethnicity or language—just by military force...
...Thubron is a cautious, complex moralist...
...Although he makes the Cultural Revolution a grim leitmotif of his book, he deems it in principle not a bad idea: "the perfect shock" for a passive people, that only went too far...
...At least, he repeats this and does not discount it...
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...But after the snarkings, the mucus streaking through their passages with a smack, Chinese spitting was always something of an aimless anticlimax...
...With their cheeks alone they made the suctioning: hhggaarrkh...
...He wonders if this "collective morality" was not excellent preparation for Marxism...
...During the visit to Suzhou—once a retirement village for the patriciate—he ignores the tourist hordes and conjures up the old city: exquisite gardens populated by the ghosts of their venerable tenants...
...Theroux cannot endorse him, so he subscribes to the crudest revisionist propaganda: that the senile old Chairman was manipulated by the Gang of Four and their clique of malevolent usurpers...
...This is the evolution of Theroux's aversion to other people...
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...More than Tibet's irrepressible native culture, he enjoys its isolation, vastness, and emptiness: "It looked wonderful to me, like the last place on earth...
...W here Theroux is hardbitten, Thubron is tender, though no less ambitious...
...His smugness is never relieved by self-mockery...
...RIDING THE IRON ROOSTER: BY TRAIN THROUGH CHINA Paul Theroux/G.P...
...or when he describes his Caucasian homeliness by Han Chinese standards...
...He watches the loving restoration of mosques, churches, and Buddhist monasteries (desecrated during the Cultural Revolution), and he is touched by a birthday party for Confucius in the Sage's hometown of Qufu...
...Oleanders, yuccas, hollyhocks, canna lilies—they jostled the water-lanes and blazed in the courtyards...
...Yet they have both arrived at nihilistic conclusions...
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...Theroux has always avoided the twin taboos of polite American conversation: religion ("not my favorite subject") and politics ("a hideous subject...
...He trivializes it: I thought of all the upstarts, know-it-alls, teachers, critics, and book reviewers that I would love to have seen herded onto a train to Mongolia to shovel pig shit and live in barns...
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...He enumerates Mao's virtues: "I admired his military brilliance, his subtle mind, his wit and charisma, his ingenuity and toughness...
...He recites a Francis X Rocca is a writer living in Alexandria, Virginia...
...Thubron stands there in solitude, overlooking an abyss...
...He can be inventively descriptive, as when he expresses mixed feelings by saying that his personality separated "like something improperly cooked...
...It is more surprising that he ignores the oppression of his own sort, writers...
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...The tone is sarcastic, caustic, and querulous, which annoys as often as it amuses...
...Stamp-collecting, chess, keeping goldfish—nothing was innocent...
...The result is fact-filled but not pedantic...
...Paul Theroux, the more popular and more prolific, is an American...
...He accepts the prevailing acquisitiveness and self-interestedness, but he misses his own discredited "puritan concept of Communism...
...And flowers bloomed everywhere...
...In a small masterpiece of less than two pages he quotes an army officer's shocking reminiscences...
...Thubron's learning complements his imagination...
...He is not unfair, but he makes a hopeless and ungenerous assessment of the national character...
...Except for Manchuria and Tibet, where only Theroux ventures, they cover literally the same ground, but they stay worlds apart in style and temperament...
...Variety and beauty in themselves became criminal...
...But he seeks, and naturally he discovers, kindness and tenderness in mourning...
...They just dropped it and moved on...
...Both of them reside in England...
...They cleared their throats so loudly they could drown conversation—they could sound like a Roto-rooter or someone clearing a storm drain, or the last gallon of water leaving a Jacuzzi...
...Whether this is a compliment or an insult is not obvious...
...Foreword, editor's note...
...Wax models of diseased tongues in a Peking medical school fill him with hypochondriacal anxiety about his own tongue (and likewise the reader about his...
...Y 101 Indianapolis, IN 46250 Please send me: Quantity Ordered Title Edition Price Amount Modern Age: The First Twenty-Five Hardcover $33.00 Years Paperback 1 1 . 00 New Individualist Review Hardcover $ 14.00 Only Subtotal We pay book rate postage...
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...Moreover, Thubron's friendliness encourages actual intimacy on several occasions, when he discovers the Chinese more deeply...
...He declares: "I thought I liked railways until I saw Tibet and I realized that I liked wilderness much more...
...The train that runs the farthest, from Peking to Urumchi, is known as "The Iron Rooster" (thus his title...
...that the resentment among classes could never have exploded this way, and the struggles among the rulers could never have taken such a toll on the nation, except under Communism...
...Because they will not stand another purge on that scale, even the victims comply with this pretense...
...Well, it was a crowded country—you couldn't just turn aside and hock a louie without hitting someone...
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...Not that he is a chauvinist: he is an expatriate who has written an ungracious travelogue of his adopted land (The Kingdom by the Sea...
...F or Theroux, Tibet is the last stop, "the only place in China I eagerly entered, and enjoyed being in, and was reluctant to leave...
...At other times the nastiness is gratuitous, as when Theroux joins a group of Western tourists for no apparent reason except to skewer them later in print...
...Most of the major conservative thinkers and themes of the last three decades are represented in nine sections, including the "Roots of American Order...
...Colin Thubron is an Englishman who has won critical praise for his books on Cyprus and Western Russia...
...Thubron is also lyrical...
...Outside of Nanjing, he comes upon a ruined Corinthian column and traces it back through the complicated intercourse of East and West to Greek origins...
...dollars...
...Outside it lies the "chaotic barrenness" of the Gobi desert...
...Theroux, according to his custom, goes almost exclusively by rail—even to get to China in the first place: for the first chapter, he crawls through Europe and the Soviet Union...
...But he does not stray north or west of the Great Wall (thus his title...
...894 + xx pages...
...Both he and Theroux are disillusioned, but neither admits a plain truth of the complex matter: that it was a particularly totalitarian disaster, notwithstanding its roots deep in Chinese society...
...They have come to the middle of nowhere, which is perhaps what they were looking for all along...
...This indispensable sourcebook tackles the pressing problems in American society and the modern world...
...also spittoons, chamber pots, and iron plows...
...He portrays the exiled Dalai Lama sympathetically, but Theroux's sympathies are nationalistic and not spiritual...
...The humor is rare but genuine, as in Thubron's reactions to the grotesque...
...He cannot abide the scapegoating by a whole generation with blood on its hands who carried out the Cultural Revolution, and who now wish to exculpate themselves by blaming Mao...
...It is the end of a day at the beginning of winter...
...At the ends of their respective journeys, Theroux is ecstatic, Thubron enervated...
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...Conversations are punctuated with telling gestures...
...Modern Age was founded in 1957 by Russell Kirk, with Henry Regnery and David S. Collier...
...He equates Communist censorship with the temporary suppression, in Britain and the U.S., respectively, of Lady Chatterley's Lover and Tropic of Cancer (more than twenty-five years ago...
...Thubron arrives in a plane, but makes his rounds by train, bus, bicycle, and often on foot...
...As did Thubron, he learned Mandarin and steeped himself in the history as well as the literature...
...But Theroux has left his naivete behind in the sixties, when he was a Peace Corps volunteer in Africa, and a catechumen of the Little Red Book...
...He goes from the seacoast on the east all the way to the edge of the Gobi desert, 2,000 miles west...
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...Introduction, cumulative index...
...and "Not for Marx...
...A sympathetic nature lends him special insight...
...Cultural life was laid waste...
...Mao carried this satisfying little fantasy to its nasty limit...
...Fortunately, the trains run on time...
...It was an awful fate, but it was easy to imagine how the policy had come about...
...Learning of historical cannibalism, and seeing that roadside corpses are ignored except as lurid entertainment, he finds his worst prejudices confirmed...
...The articles by such figures as F. A. Hayek, Richard M. Weaver, William F. Buckley, and Ludwig von Mises remain timely and relevant...
...Y 101 Indianapolis, IN 46250 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1989 45...
...He concludes only tentatively: "they [are] not less humane than we, merely less illusioned...
...Perhaps the imposition of this imported ideology did less damage to Chinese integrity than to its victims in the West...
...The effect is sad and lively at once...
...He imparts history and his immediate observations with the same vividness...
...Theroux is offended that the Great Helmsman has been repudiated by his people so thoroughly and so soon after his death...
Vol. 22 • January 1989 • No. 1
